


The Pain, the Pleasure and the Bits in Between

by findmethestars (Atunenamedclara)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Happy Ending, Thought Projection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-06-10 17:53:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6967180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atunenamedclara/pseuds/findmethestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is a mixed bag of pain and pleasure, or at least that's how Emma Swan chooses to see it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so, once again I have NO idea where this was going, I just started typing with a basic idea and this is what I ended up with. I used Emma's PoV for this first section, and the second section (which will hopefully be up in the next couple of days) will be written from Regina's PoV but along the same train of thought.  
> As always, feedback is more than welcome, either in the comments or on my twitter @findmethestars  
> Enjoy!

**Emma**

So I’ve had this dumb analogy for as long as I can remember, I don’t know where it came from, I just know that it’s stayed with me through all the ups, downs and loop the loops that life has thrown at me.

There are people out there that say life is like a yin yang symbol. That life is made up of good and bad, and there’s good in the bad and bad in the good. But I prefer to look at it differently. I prefer to see life as a cycle of pleasure and pain, and there’s always some pain in the pleasure and some pleasure in the pain. That’s just how I choose to see the world.

 Maybe I started looking at it like this some point after that family with the pitbull dog asked me to leave their house for smoking out the upstairs window (it wasn’t even me, god I hated their 14 year old son). That was the pain. But then the pleasure came from sneaking $300 from the wallet hanging by the front door.

Maybe it was later than that when I started looking at life like this. I think it probably was, and I’ve just gone back and applied this...this _philosophy_ with hindsight. I think I started looking at life like this when I drove a small yellow bug into an unmarked town in Maine called Storybrooke.

The pleasure in finding my son again mingling with the pain of realising I hadn’t given him his best chance.

The pleasure of finding my parents mixed in with pain and anger and betrayal for 28 years of lost opportunities.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt from discovering that the Disney characters I tolerated as kids were real, but not just real, they were my own _family_ , it was taught to me by my mother, when I heard her whispering a story to my brother Neal one night when she thought she was alone with him. She was telling him about how she had once chosen to forget that she ever met my father. The pain of knowing he could not be hers had tainted every drop of pleasure she had from the short time she had known him, and she felt like she could no longer live with the ache in her heart.

But then when she forgot him and forgot the pain she forgot the pleasure too. And it changed her.

So one night, leaning on a doorpost in my parent’s loft, hands stuck in the pockets of my faded jeans, I learnt that life is a cycle of pleasure and pain, they mix and mingle, and you cannot have one without the other.

I told Regina this analogy one night. It was a lazy Saturday in June and we had laughed and whispered like teenage girls late into the evening. Now I lay on my back on her bed, my head on her lap looking up at the soft white lights on the ceiling. Her fingers weaved in and out of my hair, tugging gently at the tangled mess, braiding it into something more presentable. Henry was asleep in his room, two glasses of white wine sat on the nightstand and the sun sunk gently below the horizon as we spoke.

And as Regina’s hands made their way through my hair I thought about the message I had chosen to live by. If anybody knew about pain it was Regina Mills. Regina had loved and lost more times than even I had, she had fought the dark and won and she was a stronger and better person for it.

So I broached the subject to Regina, told her what I thought about pleasure and pain, asked her how she kept going, day after day, when she had only known pain and couldn’t find an escape.

She had laughed softly then and leant down to kiss my temple.

“Emma dear” She had started and then paused, pursing her lips as she thought. Then she shook her head. “Never mind” she said simply, shrugging and taking a sip of her wine.

“What?” I had turned to look at her then, taking in her deep brown eyes, and the way the simple gold pendant she wore stood out against her sharp collarbones.

“Well...I was just going to say that if, as you say, pain and pleasure is a cycle, perhaps this is my pleasure and I had to go through the pain beforehand to reach the pleasure.”

She refused to meet my eye then, and played with her hands nervously. Regina wasn’t one to let down a mask easily, and she felt vulnerable and exposed.  

I didn’t reply. I shifted slightly and lowered my head back down onto her. I chewed my lip as I contemplated her words.  This was the woman who, in another life, had killed countless innocent people for lost love. This was a woman who didn’t stop until she got what she wanted, no matter how many people she hurt in the process of doing so.

And she had just openly admitted that I was the thing that made her happy, the reason she kept going, kept fighting for what was right, even when the struggle was sometimes too dark and too deep to contemplate.

Me.

Emma Swan.

The lost little girl abandoned on the side of the highway.

The girl nobody wanted.

I was the pleasure in Regina Mills’ pain.

And damn did that feel good.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life is a mixed bag of pain and pleasure, or at least that's how Emma Swan chooses to see it.

Nobody could argue that my life before Emma was...boring. Dull. Empty. I had Henry and that was it. My entire purpose for being, the whole reason I woke up in the morning was Henry, my world had shrunk to a tiny pinprick of light in an ocean of black.

But it was more than just darkness that surrounded me. It was pain. My life had known so much loss and yes, that loss had driven me deep into a hole of bad - no not bad- _awful,_ choices, and I had sunk so low I thought I might never climb out again. And during those dark years Henry had been the only light in my life.

Or as Emma had put it last night, Henry had been the only pleasure in my pain.

I mulled over the blonde’s words as I signed off countless boring small statements throughout my work day. I was still pulling them round my head like a puzzle needing to be solved when I stepped through the door at 6pm sharp. The smell of homemade pizza wafted out from under the door of the kitchen and the soft clank of cutlery indicated that Henry was laying the table and....there’s the smashed glass.  

I slipped my shoes off on the mat and peered round to see Emma laugh softly and flick her wrist, cleaning up the smashed fragments. The scene was so ordinary, so domestic, that it caused my breath to hitch in my throat. We had followed this routine a hundred times before and it never failed to send a shiver of amazement down my spine.

My childhood had been happy, content, minus the loneliness and the feeling of never quite being good enough. My teenage years had been harder, there had been ups and downs as I slowly came to the realisation that me and my mother would _never_ see eye to eye. My father had been my saving grace then, stopping me from falling down a pit of self pity and disgust.

And then there was Daniel.

Daniel erased all the pain when I was with him, I could see in colour again, I could see the world for what it really was, the monsters my mother created were pushed to the back of my mind.

And when Daniel left, when Daniel...died, all of that had changed.

The world was black and white and cruel and ugly and I hated every single second I continued to exist within its rules and laws.

And in my darkest hours there had been no pleasure, there had been only pain.

For 18 years I had floated in a sea of pain, bored, angry, seeking revenge on people who didn’t even remember who I was.

For 10 years I had enjoyed a slightly dulled pain, the razor sharp edge taken off by diaper changes and small footsteps, aching teeth and bad dreams. But the pain was still there.

And then _she_ had walked into my life. And I had hated her. Every time her blonde curls bounced as she walked away from my house with my son my heart would squeeze until I felt like I was choking to death on the pain I felt so strongly.

But somewhere along the line hatred had turned to mild dislike and from mild dislike to quiet curiosity. And from there we had progressed to tentative hugs, gentle kisses, whispered conversations and wild, exciting, passionate love.

Because that’s what I felt for the blonde.

Love.

All that pain, all that heartache, all of it had been replaced by something softer, something which knocked off the edge.

I had told Emma last night that she was the pleasure in my pain but I had been wrong.

She was the pleasure which removed the pain. When I slipped down, when I had days I felt I couldn’t face, she was always there. When I could have taken the easy way out so many times, could have given up, could have said enough was enough, she was always there. She would help me banish the darkness to the corner of my mind and help me focus on the light, on the things too precious to give up on. Henry. Emma. My family.

She was always there for me. She was the pleasure in my pain. The only person who cared enough to give me what I so desperately needed.

Me.

Regina Mills.

The girl who was never good enough.

The woman who caused untold pain.

The woman who had found redemption.

Emma was the pleasure in my pain.

And damn did that feel good.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback, as always, is more than welcome and feel free to follow me on twitter @findmethestars or on tumblr at the same name.  
> Enjoy!  
> Shira  
> xx


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